So in the 24 hours since I’ve released Get Git, it’s gotten quite a bit of attention on Reddit and a few forums. I wanted to update with two things.

First, Get Git is not illegal (and especially not a felony, as one Redditor suggested). It does nothing other than browse publicly accessible web pages for exposed files. It doesn’t download the files, it doesn’t disrupt the sites (unless you consider a couple HTTP requests with a 404 response disruption, in which case your site is being disrupted by tens to thousands of people a day), and it does nothing illegal. The files it looks for are, if present, 100% publicly accessible. Using this plugin is as illegal as using Google (in fact, Google does what this tool does on a massive scale – check out this Google Dork).

Second, after getting some (in cases scathing) input from the community, I’ve released v0.0.0.6, which is really more like a v1.1, with the following changes:

• default options no longer show an alert() box, just make a noise
• scans now index and store much more data, including the last commit message, the repo description, the repo config, and the exclude and .gitignore files
• the display table now shows the description of the repo (blank in most cases, but nice nonetheless)
• stored data is truncated to 300 characters per field to conserve Chrome storage.sync space

Please download and give it whirl! I don’t think there’s anything else that does ‘passive’ scanning on the market like this. It’s in the Chrome Web Store, as well as GitHub. And… yet again… please be forkful and multiply.